You know that the Democrats are desperate when they pay thousands of their own campaign dollars in order to print and mail fliers touting the candidacy of another party’s Senate candidate! That’s what happened in downstate Illinois where the Democrat Party spent thousands of its own campaign money to print and mail fliers for Libertarian Senate candidate Mike Labno in order to stir conservatives against GOP Senate candidate Mark Kirk.

Now, it’s not a cut-and-dried case of misrepresentation exactly. After all, on the back of the flier they have clearly noted in a small notation that the ad was paid for by the Lake County Democrat Party. But nowhere else on the ad does it allude to the Democrats and the flier seems as if it is a legit Libertarian Party mailing. So call it mildly deceptive at best.

But it is clear that this is a Democrat dirty trick regardless. That the Democrat Party would fund a flier for a completely different party is telling. The Democrats know that Alexi is a horrible candidate and is behind in the polls. This is a desperate move to shave off some of Kirk’s votes.Read more

It must be nice to be an Obama insider like Democrat Senate candidate Alexi “The Mob Banker” Giannoulias is. Obama’s FDIC is obviously in his corner, it seems. After all, the FDIC decided to wait until after the election is over to release its report on the failure of Giannoulias’s family bank.

So, Giannoulias might possibly be safely elected to the Senate before the results of any embarrassing investigations into his culpability for the bank failure are released.

The Illinois GOP sent a guy dressed as a shark to dog Democrat Senate candidate Alexi “Mob Banker” Giannoulias. When Giannoulias was working for the Broadway Bank he loaned millions to mobster Michael “Jaws” Giorango. Naturally the mobster never paid it all back.

Alexi Giannoulias is well known as the “Mob Banker” for the fact that his family bank lent $20 million to two mobsters while Alexi was an officer of the bank. The Illinois Democrat’s Senate candidate has finally answered to this loan a bit more directly than he has in the past and his answer is simply a bit hard to take.

On NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, October 10, Giannoulias uttered the laughable claim that he “didn’t know the extent” of the criminal activities of his mobster borrowers at the Broadway Bank.

This is a bit hard to take. Giannoulias seemed to act as if the two mobster’s activities were not as well known in 2005 as they really were at the time his bank gave these ne’er-do-wells multiple loans. Both Michael “Jaws” Giorango and his pal Demitri Stavropoulos were well known criminals by the time they were being served at Broadway Bank.Read more

Giannoulias said that he was pulling out because the Libertarian candidate, Michael Labano, was not invited to participate.

“It’s disappointing, but these things happen in politics,” Yepsen said. “The rules we put together were that we would invite any candidate of an established political party. We’re not going to change the rules for one candidate.”

Independent candidates would only be invited to the debate if they had received at least a 5-percent vote in neutral polls, Yepsen said, and no independent candidates met the requirements.

The debate was to include Republican candidate Mark Kirk, Democrat Giannoulias, and Green Party candidate LeAlan Jones.

One wonders what Giannoulias is afraid of. After all, the rules for entry into the debate was known by Giannoulias when he initially accepted the invitation.Read more

It’s almost like a bad Riddler quip from TVs Adam West Batman show: When is a banker not a banker? Well, apparently the Illinois Democrat candidate for Senate, Alexi “the Mob Banker” Giannoulias, is trying his hand at the riddle. He’s constantly told the voters that he was not employed by his family bank during the year that it met so much trouble, yet on his tax returns Alexi took deductions for his bank work during that same year.

So when IS a banker not a banker? Apparently when he’s trying to run for Senate and get out from under the mess his bank ended up in.

Giannoulias has claimed that he had left his family bank in 2005. But as the Chicago Tribune reports, “Giannoulias was able to take a $2.7 million tax deduction last year because he reported working hundreds of hours at Broadway Bank in 2006.”Read more

The Democrats have a deep bench of corrupt officials that have all helped enrich each other at the cost to Illinois’ taxpayers. The Illinois Republican Party wants to remind you of how one Democrat hand helps the next to your money…

The video shows multiple photos of Illinois’ top Democratic leaders hugging, shaking hands or caught in an embrace with Blagojevich. It’s believed the first image of the photo montage which includes convicted felon Tony Rezko, seated next to House Speaker Michael Madigan and Blagojevich, has not been publicly released until now.

Sometimes we forget what friends are for. Mike Madigan. Pat Quinn. Alexi Giannoulias. Lisa Madigan. They all stood arm in arm with Blagojevich, despite claiming now that they knew he was corrupt.

The photos are accompanied by the song “That’s What Friends Are For.” Phrases such as “I’ll be on your side forever more,” take on new meaning for Democratic officials now trying to run as far away from Blagojevich as they can during this campaign season.

The people of Illinois need to know that this is the party that was on Rod’s side, not the people’s side, and look where that got us.

Fox News has a report of the odd way that Illinois Democrat Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias referred to fellow Democrats campaign appearance at a downstate agricultural forum.
“I have (known) plenty of Democrats that are complete bozos- that’s just the reality of it,” Giannoulias told the crowd.

While it is odd to see such a high profile Democrat candidate saying such a thing, I find nothing at all wrong with what he said. He’s right in context. There are a lot of Democrats that are “bozos.” He’s right that there are a lot of fine Republicans.

In fact, the concurrent reverse is true, too. There are a lot of “bozo” Republicans and a lot of nice Democrats, too.

Still, it is interesting that a guy in the middle of such a tight race was heard saying such a thing.Read more

Daniel Halper asks a whopper of a question, one that could cause quite a lot of trouble for Democrat Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias of Illinois. Halper reveals that one of Giannoulias’ donors is a man connected with a foundation with link to terror organizations.

Sahloul is the former president of the Mosque Foundation, a Bridgeview mosque that has numerous links to terrorist organizations. The Mosque Foundation contributed roughly $400,000 to four Islamic charities that were later shut down by the federal government for links to terrorism. According to the Chicago Tribune, the organizations receiving funds were: the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Benevolence International Foundation, the Islamic American Relief Agency, and Global Relief Foundation.

Apparently the Mosque Foundation’s Imam led an effort to raise $50,000 to help with the legal costs incurred by Sami Al-Arian, a University of South Florida professor who was convicted of raising money for terrorism in Palestine.

So what about this? Is Alexi Giannoulias taking money from a group with certain connections to terrorism?

Is the what Illinois wants as their representative in the Senate?Read more

Alexi “the Mob banker” Giannoulias is facing a whisper campaign from Democrat insiders that he is not the right candidate to run for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat. Maybe that whisper is a roar because even the left-wing cabler MSNBC is reporting that people are asking of Giannoulias is the right candidate for the Democrats.

Tony Rezko has been at the root of many of Illinois’ worst cases of government corruption and influence peddling with ties that go back decades. He’s been tied to President Obama, indicted Governor Rod Blagojevich, and now Senate Democrat candidate Alexi Giannoulias whose family bank loaned the crook almost $23 million.

Worse, the Giannoulias family bank made the loan to Tony Rezko’s development group long after he’d become “politically radioactive,” as the Chicago Sun-Times puts it.Read more

So far, the biggest negative that has stuck against Illinois Democrat Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias is that he is a poor money manager. The worst is that he was an officer in a family bank that has since gone under due to shady loans to mobsters — to the tune of $20 million in unpaid debt — and other bad banking practices . And now we can add another poor financial situation to Alexi’s already groaning deficit accounts: he’s still $200,000 in debt for his recently completed primary campaign.

Despite claims made earlier in his campaign, Democrat candidate for Senate Alexi Giannoulias has said that he’ll be quite happy to take campaign donations from lobbyists as he vies to take Barack Obama’s old Senate seat this year.

WGIL News reports that Giannoulias claimed earlier in the campaign that he wouldn’t take donations from lobbyists. However, Giannoulias limited the scope of that claim to encompass only federal lobbyists and political PACs. He has taken donations from state lobbyists.

The difference between a state lobbyist and a federal lobbyist seems vague with Giannoulias, but he claims there is a difference.Read more

The Hill is reporting that Democrat Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias is having trouble raising money, which is amusing because as a failed banker he gave away millions to a pair of mobsters that never paid back the “loan”

The Hill reports that Giannoulias “struggled to raise money in the aftermath of his family bank’s collapse in April.”

Giannoulias has raised only some $900,000 since March 31 — the bulk of it in June. His Republican opponent, Mark Kirk, collected close to $1 million that same month. And Kirk was dealing with his own scandal — the fallout from inaccuracies in reporting his Navy service record at the time.

Giannoulias raised less than half of Kirk’s total, and the Republican now has almost a four-to-one cash on hand advantage.

If you’ll recall — and the Hill notes — that VP Biden recently ambled into town to raise finds for the Democrats “mob banker” but apparently even “no body messes with” Joe Biden isn’t able to help Giannoulias.Read more

The Illinois Democrat candidate for Senate, Alexi Giannoulias, wasn’t too keen of admitting it but he was in Vancouver, Canada over the weekend at a fund-raiser at a trial lawyer’s convention. Along with a dozen other Democrats, the candidate was in Canada to rake in thousands in donations from trial lawyers who know what side of their bread is buttered, for sure.

Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet has all the details at her Scoop blog. But suffice to say that the Giannoulias campaign did not report the whereabouts of their candidate until the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a press release urging reporters to grill the Giannoulias campaign.Read more

The sniping between Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias is beginning to get to full steam these days and Democrat Giannoulias isn’t handling it all very well. As a bank executive, he’s gone from dissembling about his efforts to loan mobsters $20 million that his bank then lost, to now as a candidate lying about his desires to raise taxes.

The latest Giannoulias gaffe comes as a result of his announcement of his tax returns. It seems that he declared a personal business loss that negated his entire tax bill and so Giannoulias paid no federal tax in 2009. Yet, as Mark Kirk says, even as Giannoulias wants to raise all our taxes, he skates by himself without paying any at all!

For his part, the Ginnoulias campaign says that the candidate never said he wants to raise our taxes. They say that Kirk is lying about it. This newest claim makes Giannoulias himself to be a “flat out” liar as far as Illinois political watchdog Rich Miller is concerned. After all, Miller has the video to prove that Giannoulias has said that he wants to raise taxes.Read more

Conservative businessman Mike Niecestro has been making noise about running for the U.S. Senate against GOP candidate Mark Kirk for at least a year. Even just a few weeks ago he amped up his noise machine to say that he had the ballot petition signatures needed to make a run for the office as an independent.

But yesterday the filing time came and no Niecestro papers were to be seen. He told reporters that one of the operatives that promised him thousands of signatures didn’t even get him a single one. ABC’s Charles Thomas reports that Niecestro said the politician in question is “known as a ‘flake’ in GOP circles.”

This quote raises major concerns about the seriousness of a Niecestro campaign. If Niecestro knew the guy he was relying on to put him over the top in petition signatures was a well-known “flake,” then why did Niecestro rely on him in the first place? If Niecestro was putting all his eggs in a “flake’s” basket, this seriously calls into doubt Niecestro’s planning capabilities, doesn’t it?Read more

OK, OK, this one has been making the rounds all last week. It shows one of Illinois Democratic Senate candidate Alexi “The Mob Banker” Giannoulias’ staffers pushing around a videographer who was trying to get a look at who was attending a private fundraiser.

Yeah its uncomfortable to watch, but I have to come down on this in a way that is a bit out of orthodox from all the other conservative websites railing about this video. In fact, that’s why I hadn’t posted about it until now.

I just don’t think it’s a big deal that Giannoulias’ people wanted to keep a private function… well, private.

It was a reserved section, it was a by-invite event not open to the general public and the cameraman wasn’t on the guest list. As much as I think Giannoulias is a crook, deserves to be beaten in the election, and would make a horrible Senator if he wins, I think Giannoulias should be able to expect to see a private fundraiser remain private without being harassed about it all.

As far as this one incident goes, I don’t see any there, there. But, I’ll post it anyway and you decide.Read more

Representative Mark Kirk (R,IL) has admitted that the bio on his webpage has had to be altered to reflect a change in the identification of a military award it had previously accredited to him.

Kirk’s bio page originally claimed that he had been awarded the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award. This, however, was in error. It appears that his unit received this award, he did not individually receive the citation.

Kirk told the press, “upon a recent review of my records, I found that an award listed in my official biography was misidentified.” According to Navy records the Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor Award was issued to the entirety of the Intelligence Division Electronic Attack Wing at Aviano.

Kirk’s opponent, Alexi “the mob banker” Giannoulias has played this up as a major transgression, of course. Amusingly, Giannoulias comes from the same leftist wing of the Party that is currently excusing Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal who didn’t just goof up a particular award he was given but completely lied about his service as a Marine in Vietnam… as in he never served in Vietnam.Read more

The final answer is, “no,” Chicago-based Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. is not endorsing a Republican to take Barack Obama’s old Illinois U.S. Senate seat. But Jackson is making news by seeming to be toying with the idea of abandoning the troubled Democrat candidate, Alexi Giannoulias.

And, in the end, that’s all this is. It’s Jesse Jackson, Jr. employing the ages old Chicago Democrat game of fishing for payoffs.

The game goes like this: Long-time Democrat strong-man wants a pay off of one kind or another so he pretends he might support someone surprising, someone that isn’t the expected pick. Party bigwigs rush to payoff said strong-man so that he will support the usual suspect. Strong-man gets big rewards and ends up supporting the usual suspect anyway.Read more

Over at Chicago’s NBC blog The Ward Room, Edward McClelland posits that the reason both Mark Kirk and Bill Brady are winning in current polls in the collar counties — those counties surrounding Cook, Chicago’s home — is because Quinn can’t balance a budget and Giannoulias was a failed banker. It’s about fiscal responsibility, says McClelland.

McClelland quotes a poll from the extremist left-winger website the Daily Kos that finds that Republican Kirk leads Democrat Giannoulias 41-38 in the hunt for Obama’s old Senate seat. Anecdotally interesting, yes. Proof of actual numbers, I’m not so sure. There is little of any worth to anything on the Daily Kos, but if even that wholly slanted website is showing Giannoulias down one might take that as a sign that it is true that Kirk is leading at this time.Read more

CBS News decided that if certain aspects of the race for Illinois Senate between Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi “The Mob Banker” Giannoulias threaten to make news, why the good folks at CBS Channel 2 News will just refuse to cover it.

I have to say, I find it interesting that CBS News has decided what it will deign to cover and what it won’t. I am wondering if the rest of us hoi polloi were to chose that track at our places of employment. Don’t like mowing a lawn, cleaning a toilet, doing that boring expense report, talking to the boss… well, follow the Channel 2 method and just refuse to do that part of your job!

Must be nice to pick and choose the parts of your job that you will deign to do, eh?Read more

The famed Cook Political Report has just updated its reading of the race for Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois to a “favors Republicans” rating!

This is pretty astonishing news:

As expected, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seized control Friday of Broadway Bank, the community bank owned by the family of Democratic Senate nominee Alexi Giannoulias.

The bank’s financial problems and its business relationships with people associated with corruption and organized crime have dogged Giannoulias’ campaign since early February when he became the nominee. Broadway’s failure will have an enormous impact on Giannoulias’ campaign, and it is entirely possible that the fallout could force him from the race. As such, the race is moving from the Toss Up to the Lean Republican column.

…Given recent events, it’s impossible to justify keeping the race in the Toss Up column. While current circumstances would seem to lend themselves to a rating of Likely Republican, we know that it’s entirely possible that we could well be dealt a different hand – and a very different race – a month or two from now. As such, the race moves to the Lean Republican column.

I have to say, with a possible Republican pick up of Obama’s old Illinois seat AND the possible pick up of VP Biden’s Delaware seat also looking to go to a Republican (Mike Castle), it would be an amazing rebuke to the Democrats to have their two top men’s old seats switch parties!

This would be one for the record books, for sure. I mean, has this ever even happened before?Read more

The Democrat’s Illinois Senate candidate, Alexi Giannoulias, has seen his family business stripped away from them and placed in the hands of a new owner (MB Financial) because he and his family could not come up with the $85 million needed to shore up falling liquidity.

Alexi Giannoulias was the bank’s chief lender and vice-president from 2002 to 2006. He has been criticized for working for the bank when it loaned $20 million to Michael “Jaws” Giorongo and reputed mobster Boris Stratievsky. Giannoulias’ family has also been attacked for taking $70 million in dividends in both 2007 and 2008 as the bank’s loans were going bad.Read more

Democrat candidate for Senate Alexi Giannoulias seems to be having some trouble raising campaign cash, at least when compared to the more successful efforts by GOP candidate Mark Kirk.

Giannoulias told reporters that his first quarter fund raising rang in at about $1.1 million for his race to win Barack Obama’s old Senate seat. For his part, Kirk reported that he raised $2.2 million.

The candidate have until April 15 to make their formal fundraising report.

Giannoulias claimed that his bank troubles were not a factor in his lower fundraising amount than Kirk’s. It has been discovered that Broadway Bank, the family bank Giannoulias ran, made over $20 million in bad loans to convicted felons, loans that were never paid back.

The bank is also in severe financial straits having lost $75.3 million last year alone. Regulators have given Broadway Bank until the end of the month to raise $85 million to cover its shortfall.

Quiet whispers among state Democrats have been heard questioning Giannoulias’ electability and rumors abound that state pols are considering alternatives to his candidacy despite his win in the late primary.

Desperate to refocus the news cycle upon Mark Kirk, Giannoulias tried to characterize Kirk as “obsessed” about Giannoulias’ Broadway Bank troubles. Kirk, however, has built a small 37-33 lead in the polls early in this campaign.

It is bad enough that current State Treasurer and Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias is now well-known as the mob’s favorite banker with revelations of his $20 million in bad loans to various mobsters and convicted felons — so much money that his family bank is now about to go belly up over it all. But what is worse is that the Illinois Democrat Party purposefully backed this shady operator as its 2010 candidate for Senate!

Illinois Democrats are so arrogant that they imagined that they could pick the dirtiest candidate they could find, one with a possible criminal history worse than that of their recently resigned knife wielding Lt. Gov. candidate Steve Cohen, and the voters would just mindlessly go to the polls and vote the party line. And perhaps they are right. We’ll see.

The Chicago Tribune recently reported that Giannoulias’ failing bank loaned the $20 million to Michael Giorango and Demitri Stavropoulos even as they were about to be trundled off to serve federal prison sentences.Read more